* * *¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Trotsky launches a sustained polemic against Karl Radek and Otto Kuusinen, whom he treats as theoretical epigones of the Stalinist bureaucracy, for their insistence on a rigid sequential schema of revolution. The core argument is that the distinction between “bourgeois-democratic” and “socialist” revolutions cannot be applied as a mechanical, pre-fabricated template to backward countries. Trotsky seizes on the fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat was first realised not in an advanced Western European country but in backward Russia, thereby demolishing the claim that only “mature” capitalist nations are ripe for proletarian power. He insists that the bourgeoisie rules in all capitalist countries, regardless of their level of development, and that the forms of its rule vary from the stark domination of the United States to finance capital’s adaptation to Asiatic medievalism in India. From this, Trotsky derives the conclusion that the dictatorship of the proletariat will itself assume highly varied forms, but that in every case victory over the bloc of imperialists, feudalists and the national bourgeoisie requires the revolutionary hegemony of the proletariat.
Trotsky accuses Radek of substituting a lifeless stereotype for a genuine analysis of the “living interpenetration” of different historical stages within a single country. He argues that a country’s peculiarities—especially acute agrarian and national questions—can allow a numerically small proletariat to come to power on the basis of a national democratic revolution sooner than the proletariat of an advanced country on a purely socialist basis. This, he claims, should have been obvious since October 1917, but the “ideological reaction” of the epigones has made it necessary to begin from scratch. He explicitly rejects the Stalinist-Bukharinist framing of the question as “scholastic,” insisting that the world economy as a whole is ripe for socialism even if individual countries are not. The law of uneven development, he argues, operates not only between countries but between different processes within the same country, and the reconciliation of these uneven processes can only be achieved on a world scale.
The chapter then turns to a devastating critique of the “democratic dictatorship” slogan. Trotsky argues that the Chinese experience of 1925–27 proved that an “independent” democratic dictatorship is impossible: the Kuomintang, which began as a bloc of workers, peasants and the bourgeoisie, ended as a masked dictatorship of capital. He draws a direct parallel between the Stalinist-Radekite defence of the Kuomintang and the Menshevik-SR bloc of 1917, which also claimed to represent the “revolutionary democracy” while actually serving bourgeois interests. The “revolutionary democratic dictatorship” of Stalin and Radek, Trotsky charges, is indistinguishable from the “dictatorship of the revolutionary democracy” of Tsereteli and Dan. He mocks the circular reasoning by which the Comintern refers communists of the East back to Lenin’s 1905 “conceptions,” while refusing to acknowledge that Lenin himself later recognised that the democratic dictatorship was realised only in the October Revolution, i.e., through the dictatorship of the proletariat. The result, Trotsky concludes, is either grovelling before Chiang Kai-shek or heroic adventures—both equally disastrous for the proletariat.